blue of kind

I came home from New Orleans to see that the walls of my apartment are no longer yellow, but blue. it's a grey-ish blue, I guess. a light steel blue, you might call it.

I came home from New Orleans on a plane, and while on that plane I read most of Frank Chimero's The Shape of Design, finally. it's not a long book. it's very good though.

chapter 3, "Improvisation and Limitations," begins with a quote from Miles Davis, and some pages later the album Kind of Blue comes up as an iconic example.

which kind of blue? I've got the album playing now, layered on top of a steady rain with accents dripping from the gutters. I don't think it matches the blue of my walls. not quite. if I were Miles Davis, I probably would have named it Kinds of Blue. one kind isn't enough.

Chimero's point in chapter 3 is that improv opens up all kinds of awesome possibilities. it's endless, it's additive, it's "yes, and..." for as long as you have time to imagine things and bounce ideas around. but they need somewhere to bounce around, too, and that's where the limitations come in. they might seem like the subtract, but they don't really. they direct and they push. they add something, too. limits are possibilities.

I was reading brilliant quotes from The Shape of Design aloud to friend Ashley on our plane journey. some of the best bits are in chapter 5, I think. it's called "Fiction and Bridges."

"An alluring, productive untruth is frequently what's necessary to get things going. ... Every untruth forks reality and opens up a gap between what is imagined to exist and what actually does. Each fabrication creates a second version of the world where the untruth is true."

irrealis. flying pigs.

change.

jazz and New Orleans go together, I hear.

while we were there that week, a lot of people in this country of mine were celebrating a certain supreme court ruling. in our explorations of the city, we ran into a rally at the corner of Jackson Square, flags and shirts and paint and placards all rainbowed and colorful. Ashley and I listened for a while. that whole day, she'd been gushing with happiness about this decision.  

and while I may boast disinterestedness, the feeling was contagious. to see so many other people happy and grateful? how could I not be? I might pretend that this court ruling doesn't affect me, not directly anyway, and thus avoid crafting any concrete opinion on the subject. but I do too much pretending.

interestingly, a few days after the decision, The New York Times ran this opinion piece problematizing even this great equality-increasing happy moment. friend Lisa linked to it and emphasized this little excerpt concerning the way things have been and they way they might have been:

"...activists could have pursued a different agenda challenging the need for sexual scrutiny by the state, and the constellation of benefits that belong to marriage-- but they didn’t. Instead of dreaming up new forms of governance, they asked to be ruled by the ones that already exist."

hmm. that's something to think about. but there are so many ways things aren't, we could get lost in them forever. for now, bouncing ideas around in the way things are might be the best we can do.

two more quotes from Chimero's book:

"All design springs from a complex social ecosystem created by multiple parties' interests weaving together..."

"It's the words of others that teach us to speak, the expressions of life by other people that teach us how to express ourselves." 

pretending is useful, sometimes. creating, noticing, articulating gaps and then bridging them seem to be things we humans are good at, perhaps despite all our complexity. or perhaps because of it.

thirteen: unlucky

not even the heady scent of fresh-mown grass or the sweep of springtime clouds and breezes--not even a strawberry ice cream cone--none of it, nothing--has succeeded in lifting me up out of this well (deep, deepening, deeper than yesterday) of what if why not when where how not why which who why why not but why. I am choking on feelings. smothering.


there are no stories in this. no sense. the universe is sinking me.

foreshadowy snippets

next thursday I'll be more than halfway to Minneapolis. there is a conference. once there, I will present something (the something I didn't quite get around to blogging about in this post). I will hopefully meet some other fascinating scholars who share my geeky interest in copyright/authorship/ownership/remix/etc. I even have plans to sneak into blog-friend Gina's studio and say hello, if I can (did you know she's writing a book? it looks very lovely).

as seems usual at these times when I have so much going on and so many preparations to make in the run up to a small journey, my list (pile? collection? backlog?) of things I haven't yet blogged about but very much ought to is expanding beyond control.

I could make an exceedingly random photo essay using some of the photos currently saved in my blog-drafts file. that might be interesting.... but I think the photos deserve their own less-random accompanying text. forcing them into one crazy blogpost together is not what I want to do with them.

what I do want to do with them is...something else. maybe I don't know what that something else is yet, since presumably if I did, I would not have so many unfinished blog-drafts piling up. there are too many ideas for blogging. and I don't always remember all the ideas well enough or long enough to get back to them and make them fully intelligible to other humans. if I were better at remembering, and/or deciding, and/or writing in my sleep, this pile of drafts might be smaller and my blog might also be, on the whole, more interesting.

one of these old saved drafts (from mid-2011, says the blogger timestamp) has had (for who knows how long) nothing in it but the following quoted material on the subject of false memories. mid-2011, I should note, was a little while before Jonah Lehrer went and ruined his career by making up things and being lazy. he has, since that whole scandal two years ago, lost much of my respect and largely disappeared from the public eye. blogger and I kept this quote around anyway. today I've come back to it and now it is no longer languishing as a lonely little draft.

revisiting the quote and its link of reference, I was a little surprised to see that Wired has so far sustained not only this, but all the rest of Lehrer's old columns as well.

"A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it," he writes. but that's not the beginning. the piece starts with a rambly story about drinking Coke at a football game. it isn't his story to tell, though. it's not his memory--it's totally fake. apparently "we can’t help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere," and "This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information."

processes. mm. I like thinking about things as processes. the never-ending kind are the most attractive, for some reason.

Lehrer goes on about memory and marketing. who knows why I saved this whole excerpt for my blog way back in mid-2011. today it still speaks to plenty of my own half-formed ideas on narrative power and cognitive malleability.

It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

stealing and inventing... honesty and accuracy... "borrowing" and "forgetting" original source material. hmmm. falsified memories, fabricated quotations? oh the foreshadowy connections we might want to draw between the words this talented science writer is using, the themes he is dancing with, and his eventual semi-tragic, very disappointing downfall.

in my drafts file, two additional words accompany the pasted set of quotes from Jonah Lehrer's old Wired article. those words are "graven images."

I have no clue what I was thinking when I added them to that tiny seed of a blogpost idea.

I have a few clues about some of my other standing drafts. some of them wouldn't be so hard to flesh out into something useful, if I'd just sit down and write.

there are photos of:

• piecrust (filled with cheese, noodles, spinach)
• a stack of textbooks from last fall (English 680: digital studio)
• important Texas landmarks (the Alamo and the capitol building)
• a stand of trees in the middle of Idaho
• art and architecture from Chicago
• a box of yarn (mostly shades of pink)

there are also scrambled snippety notes about desire and calculus, about teaching and failure, disciplinarity, technological shifts, and the Management of Digital Rights. I want to blog about secret codes and the meaning of The Period Store and informally conducted surveys. there is a draft containing only the words "decidedly analog," and someday I'll figure out what to write about that will fit that title.

plucked, rearranged, reviewed

this has been a significant chunk of my summer so far. books and sunshine and chocolatey beverages.

so, somewhat in the style of Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (which I have semi-emulated once before), here are my ambitious reading plans for the snippets of summer that won't be crammed full of cooking, traveling, crafting, writing, kite-flying, and spontaneous outings with friends.

books brought home from libraries:
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman
The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson
Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Looking for Alaska by John Green
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

books borrowed or received from people who are not libraries:
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing by Martine Courant Rife
The Complete Sherlock Holmes volumes 1 and 2 by Arthur Conan Doyle.

books read:
Cloud Atlas
Gone Girl
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

more of my eclectic reading-history-in-progress can be spied on here. I haven't finished much from the disjointed lists above--but there is still time. there is always time. friend Jacob and I are planning to get through The Orphan Master's Son in some simultaneous fashion, if he ever finds a copy. of course I've read the Conan Doyle before (this lovely new copy was a recent birthday gift). and for all those copyright- and curiosity-related leftovers, friend Kimberly may be able to buy me a few extra weeks with them from Tech's library, if I'm lucky. we'll see.

among the three I have finished--Gone Girl, Cloud Atlas, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?--I noticed themes of imbalanced power, precarious identities, and a bit of a preoccupation with what is real and what is not quite the same as real but sometimes fools everyone into thinking it's real. who are we? what are we doing here and how are we justifying it? who does it hurt or help and in what measures? why? these are huge questions (my favourite kind, you know. I do like my fiction thought-provoking, please and thank you).

three judges over at this year's Tournament of Books had the chance to read and write about Flynn's Gone Girl. Kate Bolick's quarterfinals judgement includes a few great excerpts, ending with the note that "Gone Girl, most unexpectedly, delivers a critique of our unquestioned ideas about love in a way that’s so inventive you don’t even know it’s happened until you reach the end." rounds later, during the championship, Lev Grossman cites the book's "clinical anatomization of all the various ways in which our personalities are fabrications, and all the various reasons, good and bad and really bad, why we fabricate them." I finished Gone Girl in two and a half days, and I can't stop thinking about those unquestioned definitions of love and happiness and personhood, and how the creepiness of this book highlights them so. who I think I am and who anyone else thinks I am probably never match up. who I want to be and who anyone else wants me to be is even more complicated.

friend Melanie has reviewed Cloud Atlas the novel and the film already, and she has some great thoughts on how far-reaching this book tries to be in sketching the ultimate connectedness of every single little thing. borrowing her borrowed copy, I let the book delight me with its variety, its structure and scope. the subtle and less-subtle connectednesses in these stories are reminiscent of clouds. sometimes we take all that ethereal shifting for granted. "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future," Sonmi-451, a fabricant diner server, announces. connectedness and unity have such flawless, positive connotations--but there are costs that come with all forms of consensus, aren't there?

so many different kinds of influence.

after I noticed it on her office bookshelf and exclaimed (on the last day of classes) that I'd always wanted to read it, friend Amanda kindly lent me her copy of the very short and very classic Philip K. Dick. this book surprised me in its careful simplicity. I have no idea anymore what I'd been expecting from it, but its calm tone and such a familiar-but-not otherworldliness... a desolate, half-abandoned half-suburban west coast... people who aren't really people and androids who aren't really people either... hmm. in 1968 he wrote this?

my favourite line from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? comes near the beginning, where Dick lays out the means and function of Mercerism: "ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off." being bound to each other like this can be scary. your pain and my weakness, your strength and my peace, all of it part of some grand universal equation? this reminds me of a conversation friend Adam and I had the other day. as we debated the powerlessness that seems to pervade so much of my experience, he made the incredibly zen comment to me that, "you are part of the universe, so you share blame with all that happens within it as do we all."

the same ideas bled through all these books, and I'm not sure if it's just because I read them all together or what. not many would look at this trio and think, hm, those three books have a ton in common. two of them are relatively contemporary (I just noticed this: Cloud Atlas won the very first Tournament of Books, way back in 2005). one is very realistic and--though a little psychotic at times--thoroughly set in a normal world. there are futuristic elements in Cloud Atlas to match the classic sci-fi vibe of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and there are tests and lies and mysteries in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to match the suspense thriller vibe of Gone Girl. then again, maybe I'm seeing things. maybe it is just because I read three non-academic books in a row and wanted to find all these threads. so what?

what are the lyrics of that Incubus song again?

sometimes you cannot see the traffic lights. the other cars get in the way, or there are glares from the late afternoon sun, or you've come to a stop at just the right angle behind a large truck.

this happens to me and probably to everyone. who knows why I have been noticing and thinking about it so much lately.

when you cannot see the traffic lights, you can also not see when they turn green again.

and since you cannot see them turning green, you are left to trust the traffic around you. if that truck in front of you moves forward, and the cars in the next lane are moving too, then you probably needn't wait to look at the light above that intersection. it is probably, at last, green.

all of this seems very allegorical.

doesn't it?

a few days ago I was struck that there is a difference between observable events and observed events. the things that happen may not be the things that I see happen. I cannot see everything. even if I and the collected world around me try--even if all of us tried to look and watch and measure and record the things we see happening, there will still be gaps between what we see and the whole of what is real.

maybe being aware of that gap helps somehow. but it also seems so wobbly, wandering around with flaws in our perception that as far as we know cannot ever be jettisoned.

so is all we can do look around, remembering the patterns in the lights we've learned so far, and trust the general direction of the traffic in the next lane? is that good enough?

(I wanted to include some driving pictures in this little post. maybe I'll come back and add them if I find the adapter card for taking photos off my camera-phone.)

never and not yet live right next door

last semester seemed full of things I had never done or even really imagined before. texas. graduate school. a dog named Jack. running. talking to homeless people. putting my hair up.

things you've never done before come in a million varieties. the kind you just haven't gotten around to. the kind you're scared of. the kind you didn't know about til yesterday. the kind that just aren't who you are.

but who says any of those not-you things aren't who you are? it's not always you who decides, is it? at least not consciously, I don't think. who you are gets fed into you by a million different cues and decisions, feedback from the world and feedback from your heart. and under the shallow eddying pools of feedback is the sandy but solid floor of your self. and even that doesn't always stay the same.

a few months ago, on november 12th, my last-semester self made an "attempt to disprove slash change one of the many bizarrely semi-foundless opinions she holds about herself and the world." I ran five kilometers around mckenzie park. it wasn't so bad. does it mean that now I love to run?

not really.

but maybe I don't hate it. so there you go: one semi-foundless opinion disproven. the amelia who hated to run doesn't exactly exist anymore. and maybe she never did. she could've been a figment of my imagination this whole time. a thin, fragile shell. a flimsy mask of excuses.

but masks can be terribly comfortable. just ask the Dread Pirate Roberts. or Lord Henry Wotton. the latter (who himself might be considered a flimsy mask of fictionality worn by Oscar Wilde) was fond of saying things like “Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part,” and "Being natural is simply a pose," and many other things to the effect that nothing whatsoever is truly genuine anyway. I wrote an essay all about this, once upon a time. maybe there are similar themes in The Princess Bride... (what a silly suggestion. I'm kidding. but only sort of.)

incidentally, did you know that there was a real Henry Wotton? just a sir, though, and not a Lord. wikipedia gives me this quote from the fellow: "An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." that sounds quite sardonic enough for the fictional Wotton, too, don't you think?

honesty and dishonesty sound so black and white. who I am and who I am not sound a lot less black and white, but shouldn't it be just as simple? maybe it's all relative. in this everso interesting post from way back in 2006, I wrote: "you and everything that describes you or defines you can be carefully separated until all your qualities have become autonomous, independent, and instead of thoroughly possessing those qualities you will be only related to them, however closely."

the truth and all the untruths are usually related so closely it's hard to sift them apart. and so I've got to be related to all the things I'm not, somehow, right? that's the stuff that floats around on the other side of my skin, poking and scuffing and opposing the stuff that's me. or at least the stuff that up until this moment has stood in for "me." what if none of it were there? what would I have to push against?

brought to you by the letter Z

the main character of this book I just finished is described by the blurber (yes, that is a true job-title, I promise) as "a quixotic renegade" and "delightfully oblivious." his name is Zeke. he is not perfect. he is not very smart. but I wanted him to have a happy ending. (I'll apologize in advance if I spoil this novel for any of you. I'm not trying to. but then I'm not trying not to, either. sorry?)

title: My American Unhappiness. I heard about this book on NPR. the author, Dean Bakopoulos, was being interviewed about it, sharing snippets and drumming up a bit of relevance. it sounded like a quirky and potentially fascinating read, so I read it. funnily enough, Zeke, working on his American Unhappiness project in the book, lies to people all the time about working for NPR, just so they will be more willing to participate and share the reason they are so unhappy. that connection amused me, just a bit.

the ending of this book was suitably heart-wrenching--page after page of disappointment and bogs of stupid semi-tragedies--but then the heart-wrench gets chewed into bits by a piercing, shiny ambiguity. I don't know if Zeke ends up unhappy or happy or if he finds what he's looking for or not. I guess I'm okay with that. I didn't dog-ear too many pages, but here are the ones I did (not counting the three-page section on the institutional slavery of Americans between pages 45 and page 48. that would've been insane to retype. I did read it aloud to my father though).

"My favorite sort of Facebook status update is the sort that is obtuse and unknowable. ... A good status alludes to some sort of emotion, some sort of yearning, but it doesn't offer any sort of clues..." page 179

"We love stories in which we are the protagonists in search of truth.... But my feeling is that we can cope with the increasing smallness, rapidness, and indifference of our changing, violent world only by seeing ourselves as noble characters caught in the struggle. We are all, as Turgenev so presciently said over a century ago, either Hamlets of Quixotes, and we must be these kinds of people if we are to endure." page 252

"What makes me so unhappy?
People walking away, dressed in winter clothes, the sky the same gray as their coats, the branches of the trees around them, black-gray and skinned." page 266

"As I drive among the streets of Livonia, so geared toward the life of family, of stable and easy domesticity, I live a fantasy life of regrets, missed opportunities. I imagine them as if they had taken flight." page 269

that penultimate quote wraps itself perfectly around the whole meaning and title of the story. why are you so unhappy? why are we so unhappy? is there anything to be done about it? will cataloguing our emotions make us feel any better?

manipulating narrativium

it's always cool when you can find little bits and pieces of the same idea scattered all over the internet in convenient, linkable snippets. thank you, Mr. Davies. that bookmarked quote you posted was a reminder of all these thoughts I needed to put together for this blogpost.

a few weeks ago, on my 900-mile drive across the deserts of Utah, New Mexico, and Texas, I kept myself awake and entertained with large doses of public radio. this was near the last week of august, when the news kept switching back and forth between a lot of american political blathering--in preparation for the presidential elections next year, I suppose--and the Libyan revolution. can you guess which was more exciting to hear about?

as I listened to all these journalists telling and re-telling and re-telling again the story of this far-away rebellion, spinning out small updates every few hours (the sizzling red rock of southern Utah turning bleached and muddy as I drove south into a desert lightning storm) and slanting toward new perspectives as new information came to light (the impossible emptiness between so many hazy New Mexican mesas baking stoically under all that cruel, cloudless blue), I started wondering.

these journalists, they're telling this story before it's finished. they're spinning this plot out of events that haven't reached a conclusion. the telling of the story is happening in almost the same moments the story itself is happening in. how does that influence the way it will end?

can the confidence of one journalist who really thinks those Libyan rebels are going to successfully take control and change the world... can that tip the scales? if reports of that success are being made before that journalist truly realizes exactly how not-over-yet the battle is... does that make presumed success more likely, even though there's still so much fighting to do?

I don't know. I just remember listening to all this, feeling as if I were hearing it as it happened, and noticing the story changing little by little every single time. the events in Libya, and new information about those events, changed the story. that's the way we're used to things going.

but there is also power in stories, even if it's only in your head. things that go on in your head tend to have at least a small effect on what goes on outside of your head. so as long as the story hasn't found its ending... maybe the way we're telling it can give it one.

muffled shouts

there's a hymn. it talks about unseen wounds, and how to heal them.

wound.

unless you're talking about clocks or stress or something, the word means an injury or a casualty. some bodily harm or figurative inner pain. to hurt. to bruise. all its synonyms feel so sharp in your mouth--incision, laceration, abrasion...

how could a person be wounded and not know it? pain is one of those really hard-to-ignore sensations. it's meant to be noticed and demands to be fixed. but I suppose the hymn is talking about spiritual wounds. the kind that aren't so hard to ignore, perhaps.

but even physically, there are a billion things inside our bodies that we can hardly imagine. the inner workings of cells and blood vessels. neurons and segments of DNA. there may be wounds on such levels that are impossible to notice.

I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake a few weeks ago. it was a very easily devoured slice of literature, but it had a weirdness to it. I'll let you go read about the weirdness for yourself, if you want, while I sit here and tell you nothing much more than you could read on the back cover about the story. it's about a girl who can taste the emotions (or lack thereof) of the people (or factories) who produced the food she eats. and it's usually the emotions people aren't completely aware of. the depression or guilt they've buried far, far beneath their normal lives. or the anger or love or neediness that's screaming silently, deep in their souls.

why do we hide things from ourselves like that? is it out of self-preservation, or something? denial, or self-delusion? do we imagine that the things we refuse to acknowledge really don't exist? or at least that they won't effect us if we can manage to ignore them?

or is it so willful at all? what if we honestly don't notice these wounds we carry? what if these missing pieces in our hearts really are impossible to detect? what if it is not my fault?

reality cannot be copyrighted

during the torture that was my flight back from england last march, I watched this little film called Paper Heart. it's half documentary, half scripted drama. very quirky. almost too quirky. but still, a happy sort of creative/philosophical endeavor.

the film's website has an about page, which tells us: "Combining elements of documentary and traditional storytelling, reality and fantasy, PAPER HEART brings a fresh perspective to the modern romance and redefines the classic love story."

here's a picture:

cute, eh?

as research for the novel-in-progress I've been working on, I've been reading a lot about copyright law, popular culture, and space travel. as part of this craziness, David Shields's recent book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto found its way onto my list, and I just finished it yesterday morning. there are not many books I care very much to own, but this might be one of them. once it comes out in paperback, perhaps. I can see myself flipping through it randomly and thinking about my reasons, my sources, my purpose. or just flipping through it and thinking.

Shields writes at the end of this manifesto(sounding kind of depressed that he was forced to include references for all the material he included), "Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted."

and that makes sense. reality cannot truly be copied. so it doesn't need copyrights. it is what it is and that is that.

but what if...

there are a lot of what ifs.

what if it this free culture idea really did catch on?
what if nobody could really claim anything as their own?
what if absolutely everything were copyable?

these are ideas I'm hoping to explore with this writing of mine. it'll be a story. it won't be a manifesto. I hope it won't get too ideological or 1984-creepy-like. but it's making me think about ownership and sharing things. thought-provoking is always good, right?

any suggestions for further research? possibly more Cory Doctorow or something. I don't know. Lawrence Lessig, check. Isaac Asimov, check. that really weird Kage Baker book... check.

or if you have any personal experience with and/or expert opinions on copyright laws, popular culture, or space travel, by all means, let us know.

might could

'in linguistics class a few semesters back we had a lecture on the characteristics of human language. one of the coolest things that separates human speech from bird calls is the concept of lying. irrealis, it's called. the ability to think about things that aren't real right now. the future. the past. nightmares. fictions. goals. lies.' - a.c. april 24, 2006

here were are, on the edge between not yet and already. what are we doing here? what are we thinking we'll get away with? where are we imagining we'll wander off to?

this article about pretending and games that are barely games has been coming back to me over the past few days. it has reminded me in more than one way of that crazy old Linguistics professor.

I love what Mr. Davies says about edges. betweenness. overlap. 'Pretending is something you do with a bit of your brain, with the edges. It's a thing of inattention, not concentration.'

and that's how it becomes such a part of us. that's how while I'm reciting to my roommate this silly little fairy tale I read on wikisource last evening, she can be daydreaming about what the pair of us might do if some frightening person attacked us as we turned the corner. it's everything that isn't real, but somehow it perfectly solidifies everything that really is.

somebody once told me that actors, and actresses, were more likely to be surer of their real self underneath all the costumes. they had to be just a little bit more real than anyone else, just so they wouldn't lose themselves in all the pretending. I suppose the same principle may apply to the rest of us: pretending sharpens the edges, the contrasts of our reality. is that true?

once, we built a fort. what were we pretending? that we were schoolgirls having a slumber party? or pioneers camping out on the plains? maybe it doesn't matter. we had a few chairs, a few big blankets, and an ironing board, so we made a fort. the next morning we took it all down again.

'We don't need many cues to help us pretend. We'll find meaning in the noisiest noise - just give us a tiny signal and we'll come up with a message.' - r.d. november 09, 2009

the rhetoric of disneyland

i wanted to write a post about the rhetoric of disneyland. i spent three days there last week. i became almost sick of the pirates of the caribbean ride. my feet ached and my head rang with all those jumbled up theme songs.

dreams coming true. that's their shtick. how they hold to that when their whole park is full of plastic fakery is strange. i suppose they get away with it because they cater primarily to those too young to know any better. no child will think to ask how much do they pay this grinning actress to wear that curly red wig and that fake green tail? hm?

it makes me wonder about the things the rest of us believe in. are we just too young to know better? to small to see the wires holding up our flying pirate ship? what if the whole world is one of those lies-to-children? what if there is more truth in the universe than we can handle?

most of me says so what if it is? i don't plan on joining the lost boys in neverland, and that means that someday i'll uncover all the lies-to-children. someday i'll see as far as can be seen.

maybe.

i guess until then we get to tell ourselves stories and play with our dressed up fairy tale princesses. ignorance is bliss.

there are a host of other small ways in which life is like an amusement park. long periods of waiting. annoying little gates you have to hop through. hundreds of other people getting in your way. pointless journeys that nevertheless are exhilaratingly fun. yeah. philosophy and aching feet.

and fireworks every single night.

[after thought]
i wanted to write about the rhetoric of disneyland, but i didn't get past the inherent pathos offered by their 'dreams coming true' slogan. there's also the ethos of the name Disney. various topoi that go along with imagination, magic, childhood, innocence, excitement, or just being able to match your kid's childhood up with all the other kids' who got to go to disneyland last summer. and there are the many threads of narrative that begin with once upon a time and never really stop leading us through our lives. yeah. rhetoric.